Comment by BurningFrog
20 days ago
This is a point too rarely made.
Most work that produces something people are willing to pay for does make the world a better place!
Not enormously so for the vast majority of us, but what one person out of 8 billion can do.
There's an aspect of longevity to our impact I love to contemplate.
For most of us, our tech work will be long forgotten and obsolete 20 years from now. At best it will have provided some small intangible advance - hopefully for the better.
But the people that built my house died before I was born, yet their work has a tangible ongoing impact to this day.
The people who built some European cathedrals lived over 800 years ago, yet that padstone laid by some nameless apprentice still holds an entire functional building in place.
I’m not sure I buy the premise as it reads as a Libertarian pipe dream. There are just too many examples of people willing to pay for something immoral or unethical to think that transactions can be broadly painted as a net good.
Capitalist transactions are a reflection of value systems and our own shortcomings/biases. To the extent that humans are flawed, many of those transactions are going to be ethically flawed as well.
The immediate transaction normally benefits both parties, or it wouldn't happen.
So as long as it doesn't hurt any third party, it does make the world better!
It's really that's simple!
Economies are incredibly complex. We should be also be concerned with long-term and second-order effects. Humans tend toward short term bias, meaning we’ll lose out on better long term outcomes. Forgive me, but I tend to give relatively little weight to overly simplified models that try to explain complex phenomena.
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You are in agreement with the comment you're responding to.
Being generous, I’m maybe in agreement if the word “most” gets some clarification or nuance.
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